The Third Man - Documentary

Great documentary on The Third Man. Link to next sections are in the "details" of the video.

Sebald Conference Report

via complete review, a brief report in The Independent about a recent conference on W G Sebald's works at the university of east anglia:

"The main debate, it seemed, was over genre. The essayist from Utah claimed him for his tribe, as he put it. The novelist from Missouri said he was clearly in hers. The Hungarian poet put him in poetry. Down on the seafront at Southwold, which is described in The Rings of Saturn and whither his colleague and oldest friend, Professor Turner, led a coach party, one understood him suddenly as a great spinner of yarns."

The Desperate City Wives

I think this is probably meant as a satire though I am not 100% sure. This might be authentic and sincere too, you never know how self-involved the yuppie scum of our megapolises can really get.

In any case it will make you laugh (unless you are feministically oriented in which case parts of it can make you cringe).

"Even as they hope they won't have to, they are making plans to economise. City wives are tougher and more practical than a lot of people realise. They are not celebrities. They are managers - plenty of them once worked in the City themselves. Economy also means home management, and already they will be preparing for some very tough cuts, though not all their decisions will make sense to outsiders.

Which holiday should they cancel first? Skiing, because it's the shortest, coldest and most expensive. How soon can they get out from under the lease on the country house - or, if the penalties for breaking it are too great, should they spend all their holidays there while the lease lasts?

Who can they let go from the staff? Most would rather do without the nanny than without the cleaner. With any luck the cleaner likes children anyway and will help out in a pinch. If there is a cook, she goes before the nanny. The cleaner also knows how to roast a chicken and wash up. Forget the garden altogether - expect to see a lot of weeds as the crisis worsens - although the unemployed may take some comfort in doing the gardening themselves. Shopping ... they have been meaning to cut down on shopping for years. Haircuts, though, they can't do without. "

The Negation of Male Subjectivity

It is disappointing to see that there are so few books in "gender studies" section (at least in the library I go to) which deal with masculinity and "men's issues." That's why I was surprised to find Kaja Silverman's "Male Subjectivity on the Margins" in the feminism and gender studies section of the library. It is actually true that many feminist books also talk about masculinity but they don't go farther than labelling conventional and normative masculinity as pathological and diseased in its pursuit of power, aggression and violence.

Silverman is one of those academic film theorists who are totally up-to-date with the jargons and theories of French philosophers (specially Foucault and Lacan) and as a result parts of it went over my head. I still picked it up because it contained an essay on two of my favourite films by Fassbinder : Berlin Alexanderplatz and In a Year of Thirteen Moons. (Not recommended to Fassbinder newbies or those with weak emotional constitution). The essay is titled "Masochistic Ecstasy and Ruination of Masculinity in Fassbinder's Cinema" and like other essays it also talks about how difficult (or in Fassbinder's case how impossible) it is for anyone to live with a "deviant" masculinity, with a male subjectivity that says "no" to power and other normative male ideals within our current cultural order. She also quotes an academic essay by critic Leo Bersani rather alarmingly titled "Is rectum a grave?" in which she supposedly explains why "rectum is a grave in which the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried." Some of it sounded a little too bizarre to a newbie like me but this essay is supposed to be very influential and controversial. The main idea from as far as I could understand is that men always act from a position of differentiated power and as a result any relationship with such a being can only be masochistic. Male homosexuality is then nothing but an expression of male masochism. She talks about how Fassbinder's questions this need for "phallic sustenance" and then shows how impossible it is to live without it in the society as it is now. There are also other essays on Proust, Lawrence of Arabia, Henry James and one in which she talks about varieties of homosexualities which I have not read yet. To make sense of most of these one needs to be fully conversant with the theories of Foucault and Lacan which I am not.

An extract from the Fassbinder essay here before I return the book back:

In subjecting the central characters of In a Year of Thirteen Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz to castration and amputation, Fassbinder also violates the integrity of what Henri Wallon would call the "body schema," that visual and postural composite which traces the corporeal outlines of the "self." Moreover, not content merely to effect a radical and ultimately unreadable reconfiguration of its protagonist's "literal" body, In a Year of Thirteen Moons insists upon dismantling as well its virtual image, the moi, That film is so relentlessly de-idealizing in the scrutiny it brings to bear both upon body and ego that the male psyche is stripped not only of symbolic, but of libidinal support.

This de-idealization represents both Fassbinder's attempt to demonstrate just how bereft of narcissistic sustenance a subject like the central character of In a Year of Thirteen Moons would be within the present cultural order, and the means by which that film further dismantles male subjectivity. In other words, the film critiques our existing system of sexual differentiation for its inability to accommodate a figure who can be assimilated neither to masculinity nor to femininity, while at the same time maximizing the intransigence of these categories in such a way as to undermine utterly any gesture on its protagonist's part toward the recovery of a phallic identification. For this reason, In a Year of Thirteen Moons entertains a highly ambivalent relation to the pain it dramatizes.

Unlike the film with which I am pairing it, Berlin Alexanderplatz never manages to move its central character into a space definitively beyond normative male subjecitivity. That text is caught in a complex double bind; although it is unwaveringly committed to the annihilation of conventional masculinity, it is also profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of achieving that goal. Berlin Alexanderplatz thus works at the same time to negate male subjectivity, and to negate the possibility of that negation. The end result is a kind of arrestation at the site of suffering. Not surprisingly, in both In a Year of Thirteen Moons and Berlin Alexanderplatz that site is susceptible to extreme eroticization.

In pursuing Fassbinder's negativity to its outer limits, we will consequently find ourselves transported, from time to time, into certain "pleasure zone" - lifted up and out of despair into a kind of delirious joy which is that negativity's other side, and which alone makes it endurable. Both the absolutely refusal of Fassbinder's cinema to provide affirmation, and the access which it periodically yields to a masochistic ecstasy or psychic sublation, locate it in some curious way within another corporeality.

Virtue Ethics

There is a great essay in the Prospect defending "the virtue ethics." Really must read. (I wonder if the wall street guys even know what it is or whether their course books on business ethics even mentions this. Consequentialism and vulgar utilitarianism has become so much like common sense that for most of us it is difficult to think about these ideas with any seriousness.):

"The ethical traditions of the pre-modern world focused on those qualities of character making for a good and happy life—the virtues. The exact nature of these virtues was open to dispute. The ancient Greeks singled out courage, temperance, prudence and justice. Christians added faith, hope and charity to the list, and downgraded pride (for the pagans a virtue) to a vice. Other virtues have had a more temporary vogue. The Renaissance favoured boldness, the Puritans thrift and industry. The east has traditions of its own. Confucius stressed filial piety, Lao Tse spontaneity. But all agreed that the virtues—some virtues—must lie at the heart of the moral life.

The virtues, for these pre-modern traditions, are the natural excellences of the species. They are to us what speed is to the leopard or strength to the lion; they are not matters of choice or self-expression. [....]

These various pre-modern traditions, eastern and western, represent a style of thinking about ethics that has become almost unintelligible to us. Under the influence of Mill and others, we have come to think of morality as a system of rights and obligations, and the philosophical problem as one of defining these rights and obligations. But where there is no right or obligation, morality is silent. A man who, having fulfilled his obligations to others, settles down with a six-pack to watch porn on television all day may be foolish, disgusting, vulgar and so forth, but he is not strictly speaking immoral. For he is, as the saying goes, "within his rights."

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner directed by Tony Richardson is another extremely impressive entry from the "British New Wave" of the early 60s. I also read the original short story by Alan Sillitoe recently which is quite good as well. The film relates the story of a teenager named Colin Smith, an "angry young man" somewhat familiar from other films of the period too, who is sent to a reformatory school after getting caught for a petty crime. There he is identified and selected by the governor of the school (played by Michael Redgrave) to run in an long distance cross-country marathon championship. Most of the story is told in flashblacks, as he practices for his long distance run, which shows episodes from his life before his arrest - the grim family and social life and occasional fun and happiness with his friends. But when the time comes on the final finish line he realizes a great chance to assert his freedom (not the literal freedom but freedom of spirit and individuality) and the oppositional anti-establishment stance. The ending is pessimistic and bleak but paradoxically also very inspiring and empowering.

What I loved in this film (and other films from the period) was its tone - the disaffected, hyper-articulate and angry voice of protest against the authority and the society: sort of working-class Holden Caulfield with hyper sensitive class awareness. I also loved the B&W cinematography which makes the grim outdoor locations look so evocative. And not to forget the sheer bloody-minded and totally anti-Hollywood style endings. Two weeks after I have still been thinking about "Billy Liar," the character Tom Courtenay played in the film of the same name (which I wrote about here). He is equally wonderful in this film. Every body gesture, every single twitch of the face (I am already in love with his smile, even though he smiles very rarely) conveys something complex and profound. Nothing is ever wasted. He is probably more well-known in Britain where he has been active on stage for many years but he really deserves celebration outside as well. His performance in both films has already become one of my all-time favourites.

*******

A few words About the story by Alan Sillitoe (who wrote the screenplay for the film too). It is written in the first person and film pretty much follows it closely. The outdoor locations feel much more evocative and powerful in the film and so does Tom Courtenay's performance which transcends the character written in the story. On the other hand there are some wonderful monologues and eloquent diatribes some of which are there in the film too but the story has more of them. At one place in the film Colin rages, "Do you know what I'd do if I had the whip hand? I'd get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, penpushers, army officers and members of parliament and I'd stick them up against this wall and let them have it 'cause that's what they'd like to do to blokes like us." There is more of this in the book. It also helps to read the book imagining that particular accent, it becomes much more interesting and powerful then. It is written in a straight-forward way but it is the kind of writing whose authenticity and genuineness of the voice you feel in the gut and you don't feel the need to do any "close reading." Both story and the film highly recommended.

Critics are Them. Bloggers R Us.

A hilarious article on film critics. Absolutely must read.

The picture above is of Addison DeWitt, the "great" drama critic in All About Eve, played by George Sanders.

Machado de Assis

There is an article in New York Times about the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis on the occasion of his death centenary. Rather coincidentally I am in the middle of reading his novel "The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas" which has to be one of the most hilarious books I have read in a long time. It is hard to summarize but it is sort of Brazilian Tristram Shandy (he explicitly mentions it as one of his influences in the preface). I will try to write about it in more detail when I am done with it but for now here is the synopsis from the book to whet the appetite of those who haven't read it. (Susan Sontag also wrote an essay on the novel which is collected in "Where the Stress Falls".) And of course you can't but love a book which starts with a "dedication" like this: "To the Worm/Who/Gnawed the Cold Flesh/of My Corpse/I Dedicate/These Posthumous Memoirs/As a Nostalgic Remembrance"

********

"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the extraordinary narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. "The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I'm not saying that it doesn't reach here and examine and judge us, but we don't care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there's nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased." Indeed, writing his memoirs from the other world gives Bras Cubas a certain freedom from both social and literary conventions. And while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

Famous in his lifetime and still revered throughout Latin America, Machado de Assis has remained little known in the English-speaking world. He represents an important antecedent for the experimental fictions of Borges, Cortazar, Fuentes, and others. In this wildly inventive book, de Assis is, in fact, much closer to such postmodern masters as Calvino, Kundera, and Marquez than to the conventions of the nineteenth century realist and romantic novel, which the narrator continually and hilariously mocks.Irrepressibly whimsical, irreverent, chatty, and charmingly self-absorbed, Bras Cubas is forever intruding into his narrative, questioning, lecturing, and elbowing the reader, commenting on his writing and its highly unusual style--"this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble,yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble, and fall"--congratulating himself on particular chapters, wondering whether to cut others out, and interrupting his life story with all manner of digressions, from a philosophical discourse on the purpose of the nose to a visionary ride on the back of a rhinoceros to find the origin of the centuries. Along the way we're treated to a marvelous cast of characters, including the outlandish philosopher Quincas Borcas, who asserts that "asceticism is the perfection of human idiocy," and Virgilia, the beautiful married woman with whom Bras Cubas carries on a passionate and not-so-secret love affair. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it.

Schadenfreude on Wall St.

I know it is rather insensitive of me, and in fact downright foolish because I am one of those people directly affected, but somehow looking at today's wall street journal (from a distance, I absolutely never touch it) gave me a lot of satisfaction and pleasure. So finally some lesson for those snooty and arrogant morons with their endless gadget-talk and other bottomless stupidities. I used to spend a lot of time with those guys, some of them so-called "friends" but no so much now. Things will get back to normal and as they always were - there is no doubt about that but it is still a nice feeling. I know this will probably be interpreted as a cheap-shot - resentment of lowly guy in IT & Operations against those who made it big but what the hell. Now back to the stupid work I was doing and thinking about "Aesthetics of Negativity in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz." (A long post on the same coming up later this afternoon.)

Somewhat related, you must read this post on lenin's tomb - a response to a career advice article about how "office gossip and banter is costing the UK £43 billion a year". Now isn't that too bad? Don't miss the comments. I don't indulge in gossip or banter but I do see my office mostly as a free broadband service. My own, rather measly that's granted, way of rebelling against the capitalist tyranny.

David Foster Wallace

I suppose there will be more detailed obituaries and appreciations later on. For now I liked the one in Salon and the one in new york times is also good, if somewhat perfunctory.

"He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism -- because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely "sincere" and "attentive" and all too willing to leave it at that. He spoke of the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor such efforts require because the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom."

New York Times has also put together a page which links to reviews of his books and also links to a few essays written by him, including one he wrote on Federer.

My acquaintance with his writing so far has been limited to a few of his essays. I specially loved his essay on David Lynch (partly because I am quite familiar with the subject and share his enthusiasm too). His essays like his fiction are quite "offbeat" too, and not just because they are full of footnotes, which sometimes occupy more than half of the page (and sometimes even full page)! In fact they can be downright annoying to those looking for straightforward argumentation and reportage. The David Lynch essay moves back and forth between an overview of Lynch's career and behind the scenes reportage from the sets of Lost Highway and in between offers critical commentary on his work (mainly Blue Velvet) in the context of contemporary avant-garde art. He says that Blue Velvet was enormously influential to him when he was a student because Lynch's work showed him how experimentalism is needed first of all to "honour the truth" rather than to prove an academic point or, in his case, merely as a medium of expressing a displeasure with the prevalent "commercial realism of new yorker school" as he was trying to do then. His essay on "Television and American Fiction" also talks about the ubiquity of irony in contemporary mainstream culture and how that mixed with irreverence, ridicule and empty experimentalism generates despair and results in a "cultural stasis." Both of these essays are collected in a volume titled "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again." The title essay refers to a magazine piece he wrote about a trip on a luxury carribean cruise in which, among other things, he talks of how one has to relinquish any sort of agency or self-consciousness and is in effect forced to have fun. I didn't read the whole thing (it suffers from a rather acute case of footnote-mania) but it is quite good. His next essay collection also had a great short essay on Dostoevsky which in effect lamented the impossibility of any contemporary writer even attempting to do what Dostoevsky did. It was again a critique of indifference and irony which pervades mainstream culture. Pankaj Mishra wrote a good review of the book in New York Times.

Pedro Paramo

I read this novel a couple of months back but somehow I missed blogging about it. This is the kind of the book which is very hard to summarize and to pin it down to its plot or sundry "themes" feels like betraying the spirit of the work. I won't let myself be deterred by that however. I will also recommend this essay to those who are interested which goes into a lot of background detail and also offers some interpretations in the context of socio-political history of modern Mexico.

The novel begins with a young man named Juan arriving in a remote village called Comala in search of his father Pedro Paramo. He has come there because his mother entreated him before dying to visit her husband to "make him pay, for all those years he put us out of his mind" and claim what "belongs to you". While on his way, he meets a man who says that he is a son of Pedro Paramo too and that their father is dead! He shows Juan the way to a woman's house where he can stay. When he meets the woman she tells him that she already knew of his arrival because his mother told her so! She also expresses her regrets because she couldn't keep the promise that she has made with his mother, the promise that "we'd die together" and "That we would go hand in hand, to lend each other courage on our last journey - in case we had need for something, or ran into trouble."

After these first few pages the narrative becomes much more bewildering and complex. Juan learns that Comala is actually a ghost town and all the human figures that he comes across are spirits who only have "voices". What makes it specially strange is that all those voices that we hear in the story are never grounded in conventional realistic descriptions of the appearance. As Susan Sontag in her short introduction to the book, rather startlingly, says, "Being dead, they have nothing to express except their essence." I think this is the key to understanding how the novel works and how we should see the ghostly figures. These people are dead (or in fact some have left the village and migrated which in effect is the same) but their memories, dreams, sorrow and suffering continue to remain there in order to haunt the landscape of Comala. It is actually hard to figure out everything from a single reading but from their fragmented voices a picture does start to emerge of a place made desolate by outside forces and also of the main character of Pedro Paramo himself who turns out to be one of those tragically macho characters that latin american novels are so full of (including quite a few who are political dictators).

Rulfo initially wanted to call it "The Whispers" which would have been a perfect title because it accurately captures the experience of reading all those voices and fragmented monologues. I think Susan Sontag's comment also captures what makes it so different from a realistic novel. In general novels which have fantastic elements are still bound a realistic form and mode of language - a language which tries to capture the surface details accurately and in detail, trying to give it an illusion of the real. This novel also feels real despite its fantastic elements but not because Rulfo wants to create an illusion of the real. His style is extremely spare and minimalistic (free of all the pseudo-literary verbiage that vitiates so much of mainstream contemporary novels) and I think that's what makes it so special and that's why it succeeds.

This is another essay in The Nation which I found very helpful. It also lists various possible interpretations of the story which again goes to show how important is it to read it with enough context:

"Innumerable interpretations have been spun about Pedro Páramo. It has been said to represent, embody, allegorize or illuminate: the times of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship, the social context of the Revolution, patriarchal rancher culture and the repression of women, the poetic qualities of rural speech, Mexico's relationship with death, the lingering influence on Mexicans of Aztec cosmology, Mexican deruralization and the ghost towns it created, Mexican culture, Mexican history, Mexican modernity, universal myths and archetypes. All of these interpretations are right, except those asserting that they alone are right. For me, the novel is about the Novel: the wonders of storytelling, the power of the literary word that spins so fast it never lets the reader catch it."

Complete Review also has a review and gathers some links to other reviews and essays.

Not surprisingly it has been adapted into a film too. There are stage versions as well. Youtube seems to have the film in its entirety but unfortunately there are no subtitles. I did however see the first half hour or so of the film because it follows quite closely to the story in the book. It is actually quite impressive. There are also talks of another version which is coming out in which Gael Garcia Bernal is involved. I wonder whether he plays father or the son.

The Trolley Song

"The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis...



I was looking at this AFI list of 100 greatest songs in Hollywood films which reminded me of another song I had almost forgotten: Suicide is Painless from MASH. This song was written by Altman's son when he was a teenager. I don't know if there is any connection between this and the teenager played by Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home Companion who writes poems about suicide too (of course without having any real clue about what life or death means). This song is quite good though...unmistakably written by a young person, but quite sincere, honest and even witty.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

These days I am catching up with the British New Wave classics of the early 60s. Karel Reisz's 1960 film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is considered an important milestone of the same movement. It is no doubt a great achievement but it suffers a little in comparison with Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life which came a few years later, because the setting, the characters, the tone and the basic themes are common to both to a great extent. Anderson's film is much more stylish and also much more unrelentingly bleak and bruising and as a result packs a more powerful punch. In fact Reisz was initially roped in to direct This Sporting Life but he declined saying that it was very similar to what he had already done. He then acted as a producer and finally Anderson directed it.

Albert Finney plays a rebellious young man with a dead-end job at a tool factory whose personal motto of life is "I'm out for a good time - all the rest is propaganda!" and to fulfill the same he sets out on Saturday nights having fun and generally drinking himself sick. "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" he screams at his superiors at work and anybody who questions him or asks him to "settle down." To him settling down would mean accepting a life that his parents and in fact everybody around him has accepted as real - life spent in the kitchen and glued in front of the TV. In his rebellious quest he finds himself getting involved with a married woman (played by Rachel Roberts who was also wonderful in This Sporting Life) and when things get unexpectedly messy he is finally forced to make some tough decisions. The ending of the film is somewhat ambiguous but nowhere as bleak as in This Sporting Life.

Like Billy Liar Arthur is also struggling to keep his humanity intact in the grinding circumstances of the world he lives in. But unlike Billy he takes recourse in rage and anger to assert his individuality and freedom, even when this doesn't really take him anywhere for real. "What ever people say I am, that's what I'm not," he screams looking at the mirror. There is also a lot of anger directed towards the older generation who romanticise the past. "Them was rotten days" as one of the character says in the film after being subjected to some golden-ageism. Albert Finney really shines in the role as do the rest of the cast. The accents are a little tough to get into but once you get into the tone and rhythms of the voice patterns it becomes easier and in fact all those great dialogues I quoted above will make sense only when they are spoken in a proper accent. All in all, it is another forgotten gem from the British New Wave film movement.

John Schlesinger: Billy Liar

Once in a while one comes across a book or a film which feels as if it was there just for you, as if you owned them, they belonged only to you. John Schlesinger’s 1963 film Billy Liar made me feel like that. Of course I am not the only one who feels this way. I am sure even the strongest, the most decisive and action-oriented of people have experienced moments in their lives in which they felt that life was “difficult” and taken a refuge in inwardness, a private world of dreams, thoughts and fantasies – which feels like the only way to assert one’s freedom, individuality and autonomy in an indifferent outside world bent on crushing you. Billy Liar is considered to be one of the popular classics of British cinema of the 60s and I am only surprised that it took me such a long time to come across it. I have already seen it three times and can see many times more. This is quite simply one of the finest films I have seen in a long time and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Billy Fisher (played by a sensational Tom Courtenay) dreams of becoming a writer but spends all his time daydreaming about an imaginary country Ambrosia where he is by turns a war hero, a Mussolini-style dictator and a president. In his more down-to-earth mental wanderings he imagines gunning down his nagging family and his pesky boss. He also can’t help inventing lies about his family background making it sound melodramatic. When the film starts his lies have already gotten him into some trouble. He finds himself engaged to two girls who both even share the same engagement ring. He has misspent the office money and fudged the accounts. His firm by the way is in the business of selling "funeral furnishings." Most of it is incredibly funny in that special painful way, specially because Schlesinger edits together the fantasy and real sequences so well. In the later half of the film he meets the free-spirited Julie Christie (some sort of proto-hippie) who has also rejected the immediate world she is in but unlike him she is able to “act” on her fantasies of freedom. Towards the end there is a very poignant scene where Billy suddenly becomes serious and asks her if she also finds life to be "difficult." She just smiles, we know that she understands what he is going through. When she offers him a chance to escape to London he realizes how important it is for him and for a second we see him weighing down the two sides of the decision – the security of his private life as opposed to escape into the real with its fears, uncertainties and responsibilities, everything that comes with it. In the end you just pray that she could just hold him tight and not let him leave, but well ,the ending wouldn’t have worked the same way as it does now.

The interplay of fantasies with dreary reality reminded me of the recent film Pan’s Labyrinth though I think this film is much superior and much more complex than that. As I said it is nothing extraordinary to invent a private world in which one can be secure, free and powerful and most of our life as teenagers are indeed built around the same. That’s why superhero fantasies are so powerful and appealing and so universal. Although the basic idea is the same I thought Billy Fisher was a much more complex character than your average teenager fantasizing about being a superhero. Most of the film is actually shot on the outside, real location in the city of Bradford which is in the process of modernization with old buildings being demolished and new ones coming up which are no less dreary than the old ones. In this context the fantasies and lies of Billy rather paradoxically make him a much more “authentic” character because he is rejecting and negating the drab realities of his existence. He has escaped into a higher realm of truth which is beyond the “facts” of his world. This also reminded me of Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities who says that in the modern world the “sense of the possible” can exist only in an inward-looking life – an approach built on the negation of what is merely “real” in a shallow way. In fact the only difference between Billy Fisher and a great artist or a writer is that he can’t get himself to act and start his novel that is inside him. (He gets stuck on what name he should choose before starting the book)

Tom Courtenay as I mentioned above is absolutely sensational in every single scene (and he is in almost every scene of the film). His tone and voice rhythms with which he relates his fantasies on the voice-over give those scenes a sense of poignancy which they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Julie Christie has a shorter role but she is absolutely stunning as well. The sequence in which she walks through the streets swinging her handbag is just pure cinema. Actually this scene is one of the hallmarks of French new wave cinema too – a celebration of freedom and free-spiritedness. Her character is also quite refreshingly forward looking – she openly says that she has had quite a few boyfriends and she is still portrayed as a “good girl.” The outdoor location cinematography is brilliant too in the way it uses those sights and sounds and makes them intrinsic to the story. There is a wonderful twist sequence with a wonderfully silly song (“Twisterella”) which almost made me break into a twist. Other characters are perfectly played as well – in fact I can’t think of any single thing in the film which is any less than pure perfection. I also think that they copied the “plastics” sequence in The Graduate from this film or at least took their inspiration from here. (In one of the sequence Billy’s boss shows him a miniature model of coffin made of Plastic - the future obviously!!)

Actually characters who struggle with their indecisiveness and their inability to seize the day and act are quite common in fiction and films but there aren’t many as painfully real as Billy Liar. This is one of the rare occasions when even after realizing that it was all just a story I kept wondering whatever happened to him after the story ended? What did he end up with and what became of him eventually? The truth is not that hard to find I guess, because I feel he is somewhere close to me, in fact a little too painfully close. Lots of details about the film and specially its sources here. I am already looking for the original novel now.

Madness Melancholy etc.

There is a nice review-essay on manic-depressive illness by Oliver Sacks in the latest new york review of books. It is actually a review of a memoir written by father about her daughter's bouts with the illness:

"One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis—a chemical imbalance in the brain—but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens it to "being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too." Such unbridled energy can resemble that of creativity or inspiration or genius—this, indeed, is what Sally feels is rushing through her—not an illness, but the apotheosis of health, the release of a deep, previously suppressed self."

Rather disappointingly NYRB these days seems to contain mostly "topical" essays. Feels like a waste to me.

Vincent Minnelli: Brigadoon

Another charming and criticism-proof musical from Vincent Minnelli. To find faults in this film is to not get the film at the most fundamental level. I thought it was less successful artistically than the two other musicals by Minnelli that I saw recently. The dances aren't as elegantly choreographed and also not as expressive or witty as in The Bandwagon (the "dancing in the dark" sequence or the "girl hunt ballet") and the songs never quite make you feel bursting into singing yourself as the songs in Meet Me in St Louis do (I am still humming "the trolley song" two weeks after I saw it).


Wikipedia tells me that Brigadoon was originally a German fairy tale but apparently so that the post-war audiences wouldn't be offended the guys who wrote the stage musical based on the story changed the setting to Scotland. It made sense because in popular culture at least Scotland has this image of being a very idyllic, rustic place where people speak in strange accents and use very curious sounding words and phrases. Two tourists (played by Gene Kelly and Van Johnson as his wisecracking buddy) from New York City no less, go on a hunting expedition to Scotland and get lost. While wandering through the forest on the highlands they come across the village Brigadoon which is not on the map. As they later learn the village comes to life only once in hundred years and only for one day. Things happen, as they do in fairy tales, very quickly (love at first sight etc). Gene Kelly falls in love with a pretty Scottish lass played by the beautiful Cyd Chariss (who died a few months back). But at the end of the day our hero can't quite make up his mind to live in Brigadoon forever and returns to the dreary New York City with its dull, phony, noisy and materialistic life. But as everybody knows the power of true love can never be underestimated even when it comes to miracles so the film ends on a happy surprise note.

I don't think there can be any argument that the isolationist fantasy presented in the film is deeply reactionary. People in Brigadoon believe in the superiority of their own ways of life and they don't want anything to do with the outside world and they are happy and smug about their isolation. When one of them wants to escape he is condemned not just because it will spell the doom for everyone but because he is not able to see possibility of happiness in Brigadoon's culture and beliefs. The other part of the story - that one has to suspend rational judgments and be willing to believe in miracles doesn't trouble me because it can be interpreted metaphorically and this is exactly what makes great fairy tales so resonant, even "poetic" in their effect, if not in their execution or storytelling. I also loved the New York City sequence. It very succintly and powerfully showed how empty such lives really are (though I would say that for me life in Brigadoon would be a little dreary too).

The songs are quite good here as well though not the same as Meet Me in St Louis. I loved the "Waiting for my dearie" song in which Cyd Charisse sings about how she would rather remain an old maid than get married to someone who is not her true love. One feels like resisting such unbridled display of naivete, romanticism and hope but can't help getting swayed by the overall effect. Two other songs "Go Home with Bonnie Jean" and "Heather on the Hill" are also quite good and later also has some good romantic dancing. The Scotland of course is not the real Scotland but created on the sets. I doubt if the real Scotland looks like the one presented here but that again is missing the point of the film. In most of the scenes the background does retain the illusion of depth which is all that is needed. Parts of it are more like a ride in theme park but like most fairy tales it does have a core of truth beneath all the glitterings of its artificial surface.

Life-affirming literature?

The concept of "life-affirming literature" seems like a contradiction in terms to me, specially in the world we live in where we are already surrounded by so many phony messages by advertising, homilies of religious gurus, the political propaganda and other such frauds which do the same thing. (Like "Negative things happen to negative people" which I overheard in a conversation today.) What we desperately need instead is a voice of negation and that's what we should look for in art and literature because only in negation we can hope to find truth and freedom. There is a long tradition in philosophy when it comes to pessimism and negation but somehow when we talk of art and literature we (by that I mean the common readers) feel forced to justify and explain - if it is art it must have something positive to say about life.

I was thinking about it and a few other things while watching the recently released Elegy, a very disappointing film based on a moderately interesting book (Philip Roth's The Dying Animal). It was also I think a very personal reaction. More and more I realize that despite being aggressively anti-religious, my views on "the mind-body problem" are actually somewhat theological if not puritanical. I idealise "the life of the mind" which to me feels the same as negating "the life of the body". It is from this perspective that I found the film so depressing (and not in a good enlightening way).

It has actually become almost a cliche in fiction and films - an old man facing death desperate for a last grasp of life reaches out for pleasures of young female flesh - basically the absurd and sordid drama of human condition all over again till the very last moment. And this is even more ironical because the protagonist in the film is a professor of literature - someone who is supposed to be devoted to the life of the mind! Maybe what Roth is doing is a form of negation too - the negation of the idea that the body and the baser aspects of life can be transcended for a higher ideal where one can be genuinely free. I wonder what he thinks of the stages of life as prescribed in Hinduism where old age means "Vanaprastha" (literally, departing to the forests) when one starts to detach oneself from the worldly affairs and prepare for an eventual "sanyas" (complete renunciation). It would be okay with me (even though I do find it very depressing) if Roth thinks that human beings are too weak to leave behind everything and go for Vanaprastha but I doubt it. I think on the other hand he sentimentalizes sex and sees in it something positive and "life-affirming" (at least in principle because all such attempts prove to be futile).

I remember reading Luis Bunuel's autobiography My Last Sigh where he describes his own old age and intimations of his own mortality wonderfully. He says that only in his old age he could feel truly free and truly alive and could see everything clearly. (His last film "Obscure Object of Desire" is, among other things, a hilarious illustration of how sexual desire can blind people to the obvious.) This view of human mortality and old age in general is there in Proust too and that's what makes the last volume of his novel so powerful and moving and puts all the sexual hankerings, jealousies and all sorts of troubles that rest of the volumes document in obsessive detail in context. Personally I am really looking forward to my own old age (even though I already live a life of almost-vanaprastha) and I hope I feel like the narrator in Proust rather than one of those Rothian characters when I get there.

Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life

This Sporting Life was the first film directed by Lindsay Anderson and by any criteria it is certainly an extremely impressive debut. It belongs to the cycle or genre of British films in the early 60s which had angry young man and working class protagonists and which dealt with gritty and realistic subject matter. They are also, rather condescendingly I think, known as "kitchen-sink" films. There are lots of scenes shot inside the house (indeed around kitchen and sink) and it is all very depressing and gloomy as expected but that is only one part of the film.

Richard Harris (who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films) plays Frank, an aspiring and ambitious rugby player, who gets a lucky break because of his aggressive and confrontational style of playing. Although financially secure his attempts at transcending his class identity prove unsuccessful. Even more bitterly he is rebuffed by his widowed landlady who refuses to return his attentions mainly because she is still mourning for her dead husband and also because she can perhaps see through his macho-posturing and his violent personality and realise how hopeless their relationship will be in a conservative society like theirs.

The film is quite long and the story (and specially the ending) is utterly and relentlessly bleak but it is also very gripping mainly because the two lead actors are so good. Richard Harris looks and acts like young Marlon Brando - the inarticulate angry young man who can express himself only through aggression and violence. Rachel Roberts who plays the landlady also gives a painfully moving performance. They were both nominated for quite a few awards that year. The film also becomes more interesting because Anderson uses a non-linear style of storytelling with unexpected and random flashbacks. It is confusing initially but once you get into the rhythm the effect becomes very powerful. It is also shot very beautifully in a stark and realistic manner using the landscape to capture the feelings of despair and hopelessness very well. This goes very highly recommended! I am already looking for other kitchen-sink films now.

The Stupidity Crisis

Arts and Letters Daily points to an article (part 2 here) about the stupidity crisis that is supposed to be plaguing American culture, forcing certain academics to write books with titles like "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future." The culprits are familiar: institutionalized anti-intellectualism, entertainment industry, consumerism, religious fundamentalism, political correctness, postmodernism, course-work centered around grades, google, youtube etc.

Film Criticism and Internet

I generally stay away from these discussions but this "symposium" about film criticism and internet in Cineaste magazine has lots of eminent (American) film critics and bloggers weighing in on the issue. Nothing new but it is nice to have all sides and all arguments on the same page.

I agree with most of the objections that serious professional critics have with the film criticism found on blogs. I have often observed that I get distracted very easily while reading on the Internet, specially if it is a long form essay. You read a paragraph and then you click something else and you have already lost that thread of thought. Earlier people used to get impatient while reading but in this age of youtube videos even watching a two hour movie (forget something like Berlin Alexanderplatz) feels like asking a little too much. There is also the common complaint about the tone: high on opinion and low on thoughtfulness. But ultimately it all depends on the reader. One can choose what to read and what to focus on and try to hold on to a state of mind for some time without letting oneself be distracted.

On the other hand it is also true that for people who are not in academia or those who don't have access to academic libraries there is often no other alternative to Internet for access to criticism or in fact to secondary literature in any other form. I wish more serious criticism were available online, at least those back issues of journals and reviews.